Book of Mormon youth conferencevideo project

﻿This project was for all intents and purposes, impossible. But i did it anyway. I did it on faith. miraculously, in one day, i made 5 videos, filmed over 100 teens in 40 different scenes and takes, and then began an edit frenzy late into the night. I showed the 20 minutes of video to a crowd of 200 enthusiastic youth and leaders, on the big white sheet screen, at night, with a beam projector from a laptop in a wooded forest with my bose loudspeakers. Yes, it was cool!all of the kids got to see themselves in a movie of their making, but when we shot all the video on the set, they had no idea how it was going to turn out. then... there were cheers!

Green Screen Layered Backdrop Plates... the GOLD PLATES :)

Each of these backdrops and layered virtual spaces or rooms, were created/composited by Grant Johnson using illustrator software that has the ability to have layers. Green screen video can be placed in front of these or even sandwiched between two layers of these drawings because in some cases there are rooms or spaces where the kids would walk through them, or even get up on top of a wall, etc. One of the great challenges of the green screen in the day, was trying to get it to work properly because there were open walls with bright background outside the pavillion, and so we tried to darken some of this with tarps, but it was less than ideal.

The SCRIPT took a long time to write. About 100 hours total of experimenting, writing, and creating the background scene plates. I had to make it easy and streamline for the kids, because there was no time in the two day event to create anything new. Also, none of them were actors, but they still did great, reading their lines. We had only a few hours to film the whole thing during the middle of the day, and only got one take, so I designed a script that could be done with a huge teleprompter. I used a large 50" flatscreen TV on the site set up next to the camera, and I filmed from 40 feet away on ZOOM so their reading looked more natural. We hung green screen in an outdoor covered pavillion place at "Camp Bountiful" in northern California, a Church owned piece of property in the wilderness. Kids waited in lines to have their turn to get in front of the camera and say their lines, or just to walk in groups, etc. After getting all the video directly recorded into a macbook pro via firewire direct into iMovie (this was before SD card storage for video), the clips were then numbered on the spot in iMovie according to the script scene so all files were ready to drop into FCPX for the final edit and assembly. That helped immensely in the organization of clips because they were sequentially numbered by movie and scene to match the script document. iMovie was a GREAT way to capture the video because there was no need for "ingest" time from playing tapes after it was done filming, and it saved a step in this time critical process. It was possible to go immediately into EDIT MODE after I got all the footage.